Simplicity, personhood, and divinity

In contemporary philosophy of religion, it is customary to think of God as an individual person, who exists in time, and is related to things in the world not only as their cause but also in various respects as their effect.1 On the whole, this model has displaced the so-called 'classical' account, according to which God is pure being and therefore 'simple'. Two kinds of consideration lie behind this development. First of all, there is a philosophical concern regarding the internal consistency of the classical view. For instance, some commentators have urged that it makes no sense to suppose both that the world makes no difference to God and that God has knowledge of the world.2 A second kind of concern is more religious than philosophical in flavour. Here it is said that the classical view fails to provide for the inter-personal dimension of the believer's relation to God. Above all, this is because inter-personal relations, so it is said, require reciprocity: they demand that each party should be able to affect the other.3 In this paper, I shall consider the possibility of charting a sort of middle ground between these two approaches. I shall argue that certain features of the individualistic approach point us in the direction of the classical view, though they may not require the recapitulation of that view in full. More exactly, I shall argue that establishing the religious relevance of a God conceived individualistically will require some use of notions which are more commonly associated with the rival view.